I agree that really imprecise locations should be excluded from range maps as they can misrepresent the species range pretty easily.
However, locations with large uncertainty buffers can still be useful. For instance, many organisms’ distributions are tracked at the county level in the US (and other countries which might call “county” something else). A location with a large buffer is often still placed wholly within a county.
Having a large buffer doesn’t make a location imprecise. It does quantify the uncertainty for anyone who wants to use the data, so I don’t see any issues here. One real problem is with points that have no buffer. Even military grade GPS has a little bit of uncertainty! When I use data, I exclude points that have no buffer as it is likely the person uploading isn’t being very detail-oriented with their data.
Lastly, I don’t think it’s a good solution to have folks implementing their personal preferences for a buffer distance that would “disqualify” observations from being research grade by flagging the location as imprecise. That means one person is deciding whether data is useful for all other users. We have no idea what level of precision the next person may need.
If there’s a standard to be set, it should be implemented uniformly across the entire site, otherwise RG will just become a patchwork of different users and their own personal feelings about what accuracy is appropriate. This would be a large step towards making the data unusable for many applications as it would strongly bias the data. So please, let’s avoid that.